Passe in Normal entries

Still obsessed with cycling and marijuana. One of the unforeseen benefits is that I spend a lot less time on anti-social media. No offense, I love you guys (that’s all inclusive, a salient point if I’m writing the entry I believe I’m fixing to write), but y’all are an investment in time, nobody, to the best of my knowledge, comes here to post thirty-five memes an hour and pauses to take seven photos of their lunch.

It’s bad enough that our president makes me look stupid by association, but, now my race and gender also look stupid by association. I may rant for a few, if you’re allergic to ranting one of the takeaways I’m shooting for is that White is not a race and male is roughly half of the world population. Oh, and liberals are making me look foolish by association. It’s easy to ignore or pretend to be angry with the lunatic fringe hard right (remember when every economist and sociologist was crying about losing the middle class? It seems like there is no political middle ground, just lunatic fringes. And we seem to have lost the phrase “I have no opinion about that” in standard American English).

I was browsing Facebook the other day, family birthdays and anniversaries, and landed on one of the eight zillion Kaepernick posts. This one had caught my eye because it wasn’t a meme but someone actually writing out their opinion. I was going to leave a comment like “right. Yes. Of course.” So, I looked through the comments. Some guy went into this long spiel about Muhammad Ali, he seemed to be struggling with getting to the point, a battle which, in my humble opinion, he lost. I think he was trying to say white Americans don’t listen to black athletes, maybe. I don’t think he knew the story very well, I mean he had the latter-day dementia down, but he seems to think that Muhammad Ali was banned from the sport for being black and it took years for white people to catch up and then call him the greatest.

Where I’m from it was considered damn fucking heroic to go to jail as a conscientious objector. Also, he went to jail as the heavy champion. See, the going to jail part might have figured well towards making a point. He would have been equally heroic if he was white; it was the protesting of the war and sacrificing everything including freedom to do so. If the guy wanted to make it about racism — well, he still should have gotten the facts straight. Um, perhaps changing from his slave name “Cassius Clay” would have worked? It’s still a bit different issue than Kaepernick’s.

Vitriol seems easier than fact checking. Kaepernick’s issue followed on the heels of the shooting in Ferguson. It wasn’t about cops killing black guys in general (cops kill white guys too, perhaps the issue should be lethal force as a peace keeping method?) It was specifically about a topical issue. I’ve also seen a bazillion things about rights and shit. Is it that the left thinks no one understood the first million times, or has anti-social media made it so that if you don’t state an opinion you’re on the wrong side? The lunatic right fringe is having a field day with all that too, but, you know, you expect them to be … lunatics.

It’s like people eighteen and over had never heard of sexism or racism until Trump took office. Now that they’ve heard of it they want to throw it in every sentence like, you know, like or you know, or Dude or random or any of the other eight zillion phrases that have their fifteen minutes so people don’t have to consider what they are actually saying. Racist and sexist are like Gay was a few years back. Pretty much meaning ‘I don’t like you, I don’t know why exactly, but I’m going to use a negative and offensive term that probably doesn’t apply but that makes it even more negative and offensive’. We used to have three distinct words; bigotry, racism and prejudice, each with a precise meaning and directed towards an action or speech. Now, apparently, being a white male makes you racist and sexist, I think, in part, because it’s a well-known fact they all have thick skins and own and run everything (All of us Jews had an emergency meeting; The Fuck? I thought we ran and owned everything.).

I’m pretty fucking sure the average Trump supporter doesn’t own or run jack shit. They might all own guns, it’s in the constitution look it up (heh), but I think a large number of them are not allowed to wear a badge. Imagine that, somebody to lunatic fringe for, say, Fergusons police department. I lived in Portland Oregon for almost four decades. It was a rare year when the front page of the Oregonian didn’t have the cops shooting a black guy. An innocent black guy. A heroic black guy stopping a holdup getting shot while the guy in the mask with the gun watched. Outside of Portland, where was the rage? One could argue that now every cell phone has streaming video on it. The incident I’m talking about was caught on the security camera. Just saying. I’d also like to state, I am not a cop by association. It’s twenty seventeen, there have been black cops and even, if you can believe it, female cops, for weeks now. They aren’t white males by association either. I’d be really happy if we could go a day or two in this country without anybody shooting anybody. I guess that kind of liberal thinking is passé.